Think, Eat, Be Healthy

“Survival Of The Sickest” Book Review

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“The Survival Of The Sickest” by Dr. Sharon Moalem with Jonathan Prince is quite a fascinating book that explores territory most of us thought was settled long ago. The subtitle, “A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease”, sums up the theme of this book. Sharon Moalem tries to answer the question “do we live longer lives because of the microbes that make us sick?”

A few weeks ago I reviewed “An Epidemic Of Absence” by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, a book about the connection between long-term parasites and our immune system. Though similar in outline, “Survival Of The Sickest” concentrates on the connection between microbes and longevity. Both books highlight how much a part of the larger ecosystem we are, no matter how much some of us would like to argue that point.

Dr. Moalem’s book was written several years before Velasquez-Manoff wrote his. The theory that people may be getting too clean and germ-free for our own good was much newer and less developed in 2007, when “Survival Of The Sickest” was written. Much more research has been done since, most seeming to confirm that some “disease” or “parasite infestation” might be necessary for people to be truly healthy.

This theory certainly makes sense to me. Microbes, and probably most organisms that are today’s parasites, developed long before mammals or humans. Our entire evolution took place alongside and together with bacteria, viruses, retroviruses and larger parasites. It seems that our bodies would have had to learn to deal with these other living things in order to live long enough to be able to reproduce.

If any two species evolved together over millions of years and one of them suddenly went extinct, the surviving species would surely develop some serious health problems without its longtime “partner”. That is what humans are doing today by trying to eradicate so many micro-organisms and larger parasites from our bodies and environment. Yet we are surprised that so many serious chronic diseases are now striking us, and that those chronic diseases appeared just after major changes in both our diet and our cleanliness.

“Survival Of The Sickest” by Dr. Sharon Moalem with Jonathan Prince was published in 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers.